Improvising
by K Hanna Korossy
Summary: The Usual Suspects tag: The third member of their team might be the hardest to break out of police custody.


**Improvising**  
K Hanna Korossy

"We'll_improvise?_"

Dean's disbelieving question was so out of the blue that Sam had to think for a moment to place it. The Maryland woods was passing by as he kept pace with Dean…on foot. Oh, right, the car. Can't leave their third team member behind, right? Sam shrugged. "Yeah, sure. Isn't that what we usually do?"

Dean gave him a slightly exasperated look. "Okay, Sam, you're the law expert—what do cops do with a car when they impound it?"

It didn't take him long to see where Dean was going with that. Sam's face fell. "Inventory search."

"Right. And I kinda think they might have noticed we have a whole friggin'_arsenal_ in the trunk."

The issue hadn't come up before, not since he'd been back on the road with Dean. They'd been picked up a few times before, with various levels of seriousness, but never the car. Surely Dad… Sam sighed. "So…what? CSI lab?"

Dean nodded. "CSI lab."

Great. Because they hadn't broken enough laws the last two days.

00000

Dean was the better of the two of them at both strategy and B&E, which was saying something considering Sam had escaped from a police station the day before. But he left it to his brother to make the plans this time. It was Dean's baby they were breaking out here, after all, and the guy was a reluctant expert at police stations. Besides, it left Sam free to heckle.

"You want me to _what?_"

"Nothing drastic, or they'll know something's up. Just a small distraction."

"Right. And all the lab guys are going to leave what they're doing and come talk to me."

"Dude, it's not _CSI_—they'll be lucky to have two guys on shift. It's not a big deal."

"Then why don't you do it?"

Dean's shoulders hitched. "Fine. You wanna grab the film and notes and repack the trunk instead?"

Sam glared at him. He hated limited options when they all stank. "If you get arrested and dragged out into the middle of nowhere again to be executed, I'm not coming after you."

Dean grinned back. "Sure you are."

"I'm not, man." Sam punctuated the declaration with a solid shake of the head.

"You so are. Who else is gonna confess to distract the cops so you can make a break for it?"

He couldn't really argue that one. Sam's lips tightened, then he narrowed his eyes at Dean. "Hey, what did you tell them, anyway?"

Dean's mouth curled. "Let's just say they probably think I'm loco as well as a killer now."

"Oh, God, Dean," he groaned, and it was as much a prayer as a protest. God protect insane older brothers with too little sense of self-preservation. The really scary part was that Dean seemed _amused_ by it all.

"So, you ready to do this?"

Sam blinked, looking from Dean to the building, back to Dean again. "In broad daylight?"

"I'm not leaving my baby in there any longer than I have to," Dean shot back indignantly.

Sometimes Sam thought his brother's priorities were seriously skewed.

00000

Sam adjusted his tie nervously, flattened his suit coat. They'd decided the jeans could stay: business casual. Still, he felt incredibly conspicuous as he got buzzed through the front door and smiled his most sincere smile at the lady at the front desk.

"Hello, my name's Sean Warren. I'm here to pick up a package from the CSI lab?" He held up the ID for inspection. Dean had broken into three cars in the lot outside before finding a badge he could bastardize for Sam. It wouldn't hold up to close inspection, but hopefully it wouldn't need to.

The woman only gave it a cursory glance…thank God, because he really didn't want to explain why the badge really said Christine Appleby on it. With his luck, the front desk lady would even know Ms. Appleby. But she just shoved a clipboard at him and he scrawled something totally illegible on it before smiling at her again and getting buzzed in.

Geez, he was sweating already. Just because he knew how to do this and do it well didn't mean he'd ever gotten used to it. Or loved it like Dean did. Sam dragged a hand over his forehead, shoving his bangs back into something resembling professional, and kept going.

It really wasn't like _CSI_: no moody lighting, no glass-walled cubicles. The offices were a series of typical wooden doors with placards on them, the lab just across the hall. Hopefully, the stuff from the car hadn't made it that far yet. Sam headed for the door at the end, the back room that would abut on the impound lot for car-scene examinations. There, he tentatively knocked.

The middle-aged man in a labcoat who answered seemed annoyed at the interruption. "Yes?"

"Oh, uh, hi. Listen, my name's Sean Warren and I'm new here—" a vague gesture at his badge, which the man also didn't do more than glance at, "—and I work upstairs, but I'm just…" _swallow_"…really fascinated by what you guys do, and I was wondering, could I maybe just…see what it looks like? I mean, if I'm not disturbing you." He smiled persuasively at the guy, but it was an old maxim of Dean's, or maybe their Dad's, that people liked talking about their areas of expertise.

Cold CSI Dude was no exception. He melted under the fanboy stroking and, after a moment of waffling, gave in. Soon, Sam was inside, trying to ignore the '67 Impala that sat by the door of the garage while his tour guide—Alan—waxed rhapsodic about the tire imprints from a crime scene they were comparing to a seized Honda. It took ten minutes, Sam's smile straining at the edges, before he could coax the guy over into the next room for an equally exciting lecture on fiber evidence.

He only heard the eventual squeak of the garage door because he was listening for it, and asked his next question louder to cover the distant purr of the engine when Dean started her up outside. After another five minutes on light refraction in fibers and material analysis to give Dean time to put some distance between them, Sam regretfully remembered a task he was supposed to be doing for his boss and said his good-byes.

He was a block away, hunched into his jacket against the wind coming in off the harbor, when the familiar rumble came up behind him and pulled alongside. Then Dean's voice, sounding way too cheerful. "Hey, little girl, want a ride?"

Sam gave him a pro forma grimace but got in the car.

"Any problems?" Dean asked, the Impala still idling. Sam noticed his brother's left hand hovering over the driver's side door, and recognized the possessive protectiveness from having been on the receiving end of it many times himself. It should have annoyed him, the car getting the same treatment, but instead it was comforting. Some things never changed. "Nope. Besides learning a lot more than I ever wanted to about the refraction indices of polyester versus cotton."

"Huh?"

He shook his head. "Never mind. So, can we go now?"

Dean cleared his throat. "Uh, not exactly."

Sam sat up straighter. "What do you mean, not exactly? It didn't look like they'd even gotten to the car yet—wasn't the stuff still in the trunk?"

"Most of it was, yeah—I don't think they took more than a look, but I grabbed all their notes and film just in case." A nod into the back seat had Sam turning to see a pile of paperwork, several canisters of film, and a camera. Why steal just your stuff back from the cops when you could pick up a few extras, right?

Sam shook his head, trying not to smile, and returned his attention to Dean. "Okay, so, what's the hold-up?"

"They've still got my shotgun. It was under the seat when I stopped at the Giles', and I guess one of the cops got a little twitchy and grabbed it."

Sam frowned at him. "That's it? What's the big deal—they already know you had one, and it's not like they can connect a shotgun to a shooting, right? Let them keep it."

Dean shot him a look, one Sam thought he should recognize but that only told him his brother was determined. "I'm not leaving without that gun, Sam."

"Dean—"

"It was Dad's, all right?"

Oh. Sam stared out the windshield and slowly nodded, then back to Dean. "Yeah, all right. But have you got another plan? Because I don't think Alan's gonna buy that I'm back for part two of the tour."

Dean shook his head. "Naw, it would be at the firearms lab by now, anyway. But now that we know what the layout of the place is…" A slow grin crawled across his face.

Which made Sam instantly suspicious. "What?"

"I always wanted to be a fireman."

00000

It was a lot simpler the second time around. Dean climbed through the window of an empty office and set off the fire alarm he'd found the first time he'd broken in. While Sam played lookout, signaling when all the lab personnel had trickled out into the parking lot, Dean broke in another window and shimmied inside. Two minutes later, it was Sam meeting him with the car down the street.

"Dude, cops often have the worst security. They figure nobody's gonna be stupid enough to rob them," Dean crowed.

"Yeah, 'cause they've never met you," Sam said dryly. "You get it?"

Dean pulled the weapon out from inside his jacket, brandishing it in triumph.

Sam quickly reached over and shoved it down. "We're still in the middle of the city—keep that thing out of sight!"

"Whatever." Dean was busy caressing the barrel, intently checking his prize for damage or abuse.

There was a derisive comment on the tip of Sam's tongue, but he held it back. Dean didn't own much, but he took care of what he had, be it car, weapons, or brother. More importantly, both the Impala and the gun were a link to Dad. All Sam had of his father's was a battered journal and an axe, and he was stupidly sentimental about both. He couldn't blame Dean for the same.

"Sam, pull over."

The sudden request had Sam pulling up to a curb even as he gave his brother a worried glance. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing." A quicksilver smile. "I wanna drive."

Sam wasn't about to argue. Neither of them had gotten much sleep the night before, but Dean generally tolerated that better than Sam. Maybe because he tended to sleep better when they did get some rest. At any rate, it wasn't too long after Sam settled into the passenger seat that the adrenalin drain and the engine's familiar growl lulled him into a twilight doze.

The_ta-tunk_of the car passing over bridge joints—they were in Chesapeake Bay territory with its hundred little inlets—roused him to half-awakening. Sam's eyes slitted open. He was turned with his back to the door, facing Dean, and the look on his brother's face chivvied Sam into complete wakefulness. He stretched and yawned, watching with interest as Dean's face smoothed out.

"Where are we?" Sam asked.

"'Bout halfway through Jersey."

"We gonna stop for gas soon?"

"In Jersey?" Dean tossed him an incredulous look.

"Uh…yeah?"

"Dude, they don't let you pump your own gas. I'm not letting a stranger put something in my car."

Huh. All his life he'd traveled around the country and still he learned new things all the time. Dean's insistence on bypassing the Garden State whenever possible was starting to make some warped sense; it figured full-service gas stations would be an insult to his brother. Sam glanced around the darkening back road. "Still, we should stop for the night soon."

"Not yet. I want to get in a few more miles first." There, that look again, just for an instant. Almost…haunted.

As someone who hunted haunting things as his job, though, Dean was not easy to spook. Sam rubbed the sleep out of his eyes while he considered what that meant.

"Hey, if you wanna get some more sleep…"

"No, I'm okay." Sam cleared his throat, looked away from his brother when he spoke. "I'm sorry we didn't get there sooner. When Pete had you back in the woods."

Dean threw him a look. "What, are you kidding me? That was perfect timing, man, like something out of a Bruce Willis movie. Dude had just quit monologuing and was getting around to shooting me when you two showed up."

He sounded like he meant it, too, more impressed than shaken by the last-minute rescue. Okay, so that wasn't what was bothering him. Sam cast around for another candidate. "So I hear you found Karen's body."

"Yup, same MO as Tony."

"That sounds pleasant."

A tilt of the head. "I've seen worse. Remember that vengeful spirit up in Bangor?" Dean shuddered.

Sam should have figured that one. He shifted in his seat. "You know, they were trying to get me to give you up for it. I don't think they thought I had anything to do with it, just that you'd corrupted me or something."

"Well, I try." Dean grinned.

"They treated me fine, though. Even got me coffee."

Something on the side of the road snagged Dean's attention, and he gave it a few glances before turning his attention back to his driving. Totally ignoring Sam's attempt to reassure him about his welfare.

Okay… "It didn't look like the CSIs—"

"Sammy, just say it."

He pulled back in surprise. "What?"

"Whatever's on your mind that you're trying to ask me without asking me. Just spit it out."

Sam snorted. Right. Why didn't he think of that? "What's bugging you?"

"Nothing's bugging me," came the immediate answer.

"And that's why I didn't just spit it out."

Dean threw him an annoyed look, hands twisting on the steering wheel.

Sam stayed silent. Pushing would only make Dean clam up more; time was the best way to get his big brother to talk. Sam could wait him out, even if the answer came in the middle of dinner two weeks from now.

As it turned out, he didn't have to wait that long. Five minutes, tops, before Dean quietly spoke up. "I'm just sick of being cooped up, okay?"

Sam's face softened. If he'd been the girl Dean routinely accused him of, he might have contemplated how much Dean had lost lately, that the loss of control had been one blow too many. Or if he were remotely as emo as Dean claimed, it might have bothered Sam that his claustrophobic brother had been chained and locked up for a long time by people who should have been on his side.

But, of course, he wasn't. Dean would have left him tied to a motel bed for that kind of thinking. So instead, Sam just said, "Hey, you want to go camping?"

He got a very long, suspicious, assessing look for that, which he returned in all innocence. "You hate camping."

"Yeah, so do you." It didn't help that every childhood camping trip they'd taken was also a hunt with _real_ghost stories lurking beyond the firelight.

Of course, that wasn't a bad thing in Dean's book. "It's cold out."

"True," Sam nodded. "Warmer down south."

"No kidding." A pause. "Last time we camped it was because you almost drowned."

Not to be outdone, "Time before that, you nearly got eaten."

There was a long silence, the Impala chewing up the asphalt under them. Dean finally shrugged. "Yeah, okay, let's go camping."

Sam smiled.

**The End**

_Author's Note: This work of fiction in no way condones or demonstrates techniques for breaking into BPD's CSI labs!_


End file.
